BORO can win at Watford to take the play-off chase to the wire - but they shouldn’t be facing such a tense finale.

Tony Mowbray’s side should have been home and dry and safe in the top six slots already.

That is the no-nonsense assessment of box-to-box battler Nicky Bailey, who says Boro - who need to win on Saturday and also hope Cardiff lose at Crystal Palace - have made it difficult for themselves.

“We shouldn’t even be in this position,” insists the midfield dynamo, who got a crucial leveller in the televised 2-1 win over Southampton that set up the last-gasp play-off push.

“We have to go into the last game and win that and hope other results go our way. And we know we can do that, so we are in there with a fighting chance.

“But it shouldn’t really have come down to this. We have made it really hard for ourselves. We should be in the play-offs already.

“We know there are points of the season where we haven’t been good enough and we’ve let ourselves down.

“We’ve had jitters. January was awful. And we know that home form hasn’t been good enough and if we don’t go up we have to put that right next year if we want to get out of this division.

“Away form has been good but we know just one extra win somewhere along the line at home and we wouldn’t be having this discussion because we’d be in there already and our place would be cemented.”

Video: Philip Tallentire - Southampton reaction

And Bailey believes that for all the problems with a small squad and limited finances a play-off place was a realistic target from the off.

“Why not? Some people may have thought that our chances of getting into the play-offs were low but I never thought that,” he explained.

“We finished the last season really well, playing good football and getting some good results against some of the teams at the top so we had a good squad. Then we brought in a couple of fresh faces so I couldn’t see why not. I still don’t see why not. We should be in there.

“We have just beaten Southampton, who have been one of the favourites to go up all season, and that was a big result and a big performance. We know if we play well then we can win.

“So we will go to Watford on Saturday with confidence. We know what we need to do. We still have a chance. Hopefully we will take a big crowd there and do ourselves justice and win. We need to go there and do our bit and hope the other team does us a favour.”

Former Boro defender Brian Phillips dies >>>

DISGRACED former Boro defender Brian Phillips has died aged 80.

The craggy central defender, then at Mansfield, was jailed in 1965 and banned from football for life for his part in a notorious match-fixing scandal that rocked the game.

Phillips, who played 121 games for Boro between 1955-60, was revealed to be among the ringleaders of a widespread network of lower league players involved in bribery and was jailed for 15 months.

Another key figure was his ex-Boro team-mate Ken Thompson, then at Hartlepool. The case revived dark suspicions voiced earlier about the Boro defence by Brian Clough.

Phillips later had his life ban lifted by the FA and managed non-league Rainworth, taking them to an FA Vase final at Wembley in 1982.